An enourmous amount of widely used Open Source projects are completely dependent on 1 person. If you use this this creates a huge risk. So contribute to the projects you use. Paper: https://t.co/wJRnmPmmAZ https://t.co/2MeuOdXmgL

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Abstract

The Truck Factor designates the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. It can be seen as a measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. We calculate the Truck Factor for 133 popular GitHub applications, in six languages. To infer the authors of a file we use the Degree-of-Authorship (DOA) metric, which is computed using version history data, and to estimate the Truck Factor, we use a greedy heuristic. Results show that most systems have a small truck factor (46% have Truck Factor=1 and 28% have Truck Factor=2).

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Guilherme Avelino conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Marco Tulio Valente conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Andre Hora conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

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Funding

This work was funded by grants from Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) and Minas Gerais Research Foundation (FAPEMIG). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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